Bill Mares
(November 8, 1940 - July 29, 2024)
Bill Mares was a former journalist, state representative and high school teacher. He authored or co-authored 20 books on subjects ranging from the U.S. Marines to desert travel, from war memorials to brewing beer, from beekeeping to Vermont humor. Even a casual online search will reveal Bill's accomplishments and affiliations, wisdom and humor. VTDigger has published a look at Bill's life but rather than include that below we offer the following reminiscence from one of his many friends and students.
Bill taught me the basics of beekeeping on five dark, cold Tuesday evenings at CVU nine years ago. I got to know him better through my years of volunteering at the Tunbridge Fair . He gave himself to the VBA’s Tunbridge efforts with an enthusiasm that characterized all he did.
One of the perks of my being on the Tunbridge committee was occasionally making the round trip to Tunbridge with Bill. We talked about beekeeping, Tunbridge, and even high school teaching since Bill had done his student teaching in the school where I taught and he had gone on to fifteen years of teaching at CVU.
What I remember most about those conversations was what he told me about his family and his earlier life. One of Bill’s grandfather’s had come to this country from Eastern Europe over 100 years ago. Although a skilled craftsman in, I believe, leatherwork, one of his first jobs was as an American cowboy herding cattle out west, which led to his settling in Montana where he set up a small business. This was at a time when prospectors were eagerly searching for gold in that state. By chance, two prospectors came to Bill’s grandfather to request a small loan in return for a percentage of whatever gold they found. Bill said they discovered gold almost on the same day they had set out, and his grandfather’s return on his loan enabled him to establish a larger business that allowed his family to prosper.
Bill’s father went to high school in Montana; among his fellow students were Myrna Loy and Gary Cooper. He became a lawyer, married, had a family, moved to Texas, and, ultimately, St. Louis where he became one of the top lawyers in Monsanto’s legal department. Meanwhile, Bill had graduated from high school in Texas and gone to Harvard; with a self-deprecation that we know well, he said he got into Harvard because the school wanted to diversify its student body by admitting a Texan.
After college, he moved to the Northeast where he met a young woman to whom he proposed marriage. She accepted, but on one condition. He would have to wait at least one year for her to finish her studies in Chicago. He followed her to Chicago where he became a newspaper reporter. They married after her final year of study.
As you probably know, Chris, Bill's wife, is an expert restorer of the painted curtains that were common in New England theaters and civic buildings in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Bill said there’s one in Burlington’s City Hall. His pride in and admiration for Chris shone when he talked about her.
I treasure the memory of those rides with Bill. I wish I had heard more of his stories. He must have had hundreds about his newspaper days and his days in the Vermont legislature. And I would have loved to hear about the rugby he played when he was a young man and the homilies he gave at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in recent years.
Bill’s spirit and enthusiasm were as strong as ever in these last weeks. Those of us who attended the VBA’s recent summer meeting in St. Albans witnessed that when we heard him ask us to support his dream of establishing a museum of Vermont beekeeping.
To get back to where I started, Bill taught me lot about beekeeping at CVU. And that education continued through the years. But because we are of the same vintage, in the last nine years he taught me something else that I treasure even more. He taught me how to be old.
-- Richard Roy is treasurer of the Vermont Beekeepers Association
